According to Senator Jam Mehtab Dahar, a member of the Senate Sub-Committee on Health, more than 90% of the private nursing schools and colleges in Sindh and many other regions of the country are fraudulent because they are either run by government employees, affiliated with universities and hospitals hundreds of kilometers away, or exist only on paper.
“Our inquiry has revealed that most of the private nursing schools and colleges in Sindh, approximately 90 percent as well as many in other parts of the country are bogus and are not being run in a transparent manner.
For instance, one of the nursing colleges is being run by a person, who was sacked by me for stealing medicines from a public hospital when I was Sindh health minister, got reinstated and is now running a nursing college”, Senator Dahar observed during the meeting of Senate Sub-Committee on health.
Senator Rubina Khalid, who was in charge of the meeting, raised grave concerns about the way the Pakistan Nursing Council (PNC) operated and gave the Ministry of Health and the Pakistan Nursing Council one month to take action against fraudulent nursing schools and shut them down.
The Pakistan Nursing Colleges Council has been discussing these issues for the past year, but Senator Dr. Mehr Taj Roghani regretted that no one was taking them seriously despite the fact that people were dying and being permanently injured as a result of the carelessness and stupidity of incompetent nurses.
Senator Rubina Khalid, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee, brought up the topic of repatriating the Assistant Registrar of the PNC to her parent department once more, pointing out that the fact that the case has been pending for the past year is evidence of the PNC’s authority, which she claimed to be bigger than the Prime Minister.
She claimed that the PMC’s failure to carry out the National Assembly committee’s and the Senate committee’s directives regarding the repatriation of Mrs. Yasmeen Azad, the assistant registrar of the Pakistan Nursing Council, is clear proof of this.
The position of the registrar and other deputies would change with the creation of the new council, according to additional secretary of health Kamran Rehman.
He informed the committee that the new Nursing Council, which will serve as the organization’s governing body, had been established and that its inaugural meeting would take place tomorrow (Wednesday).
The issue of phony degrees and colleges, he claimed, will be quickly handled once the new council gets up and running, and an order for repatriation will also be carried out.
Following the first internal meeting of the new council, the subcommittee determined that the president and representatives of the new council, in particular, would be invited to the following subcommittee meeting.
The PNC advised stern legal action against any ghost institutes in its brief to the subcommittee, stating that it does not recognize any ghost or phony nursing institutes.
Additionally, the subcommittee instructed the PNC to present a report on the monitoring of ghost institutions and whether any of them were shut down by the council at the following meeting.
“What kind of mafia is this’’ Senator Rubina Khalid remarked, does PNC has no monitoring authority? She asked questions and gave the Ministry instructions to provide an explanation of the change to the PNC (change) Act, 2023.
Senator Prof. Dr. Mehr Taj Roghani, Senator Jam Mehtab Hussian Dahar, Additional Secretary Ministry of Health, and other PNC and ministry personnel were present during the meeting.
To read our blog on “Illegal Nursing Schools and Colleges to be closed immediately,” click here.
